When we set up an R&D shop in downtown Kirkland, Washington two years ago, we hoped to attract the best talent in the Pacific Northwest -- folks who are serious about their coffee and don't especially want to move to Silicon Valley. Since then we've attracted many engineers who were tickled silly about working on large clusters of several thousands of machines, not to mention shipping web and client-based consumer apps used by millions of people. In the last two years, our Kirkland engineering team has conceived and launched a dozen products ranging from core search product improvements to Ads Optimization, Sitemaps and Webmaster Central, plus such consumer applications as Google Talk, Chat, Pack, Video, Music Trends, and mobile SMS. (Here's a summary of what we've done out of the Kirkland office.)

But it's not all work -- there's the food. Like a single day's lunch menu this week: roasted turkey breast, chili red bean patties, scalloped potatoes, roasted cranberry & Satsuma orange salad, classic clam chowder, carrot and coriander soup. You really can't operate in the Seattle area without offering good food, of course, so we offer as much good fuel -- fresh, healthy, and, whenever possible, locally-grown -- as it takes!

So if you're an engineer, UE expert or product manager who loves coffee (not to mention the mountains and the sea) -- and you want to have a great time while you're building world-changing products, please consider our Northwest outpost.